I’m not disagreeing with you.
If so, color me atypical.
Not even close to the same thing.
It’s not about not letting your kid see it, or protecting him totally or anything. It’s about the message you send.
Put a filter on it. Let him navigate his own way around it. TALK TO HIM about spyware and the weird shit you can find out there. Keep an eye on his history. If he visits porn sites, see what kind of porn sites they are.
You do need to direct his sexual growth, gently. I think parents do make a big mistake in that they expect children to form as fully mature sexual adults, but neither do we need to throw them into the deep end.
It may be pointless to try but I firmly believe you should try anyway. Because, it will make a difference to him that you tried. Children, even teens, need boundaries and limits, and the time is coming (if it’s not here already) where he will be trying your limits constantly. Does that make sense?
My current concern is not so much pornography as illegal file sharing, so I do try to limit unbridled access to the raw Internet.
Some months back I received an unpleasant email from the security department of my ISP telling me to cease and desist downloading illegal copies of software. This was the real deal: they included logs and everything. A few questions determined that my teenagers were responsible.
My response was to banish the teenagers to their own network, which I control very rigidly, allowing them limited times.
Here’s my writeup on setting up a network like this: Banish the kids to their own network!
For filtering, I use a fairly lightweight solution—I use OpenDNS as our DNS provider. This option keeps the honest people honest, though a determined teenager could get through it with minimal effort. The main purpose of the OpenDNS configuration is to avoid nasty surprises—they provide plenty of blacklists that block lots of unwanted content.
Here’s my writeup on setting up OpenDNS: A cheap and cheerful way to reduce Internet surprises
For a few years I had used a more robust solution: a custom Internet proxy server.
I had a Linux box running Squid and DansGuardian to do this.
Squid is a web proxy server, which allowed me to set a complex blackout schedule (e.g. limited Internet access on school nights) as well as to set up special pages that would appear if certain terms showed up.
DansGuardian is your typical net nanny kind of filter, but it runs on a server. It allows you to choose from dozens of categories of blacklists to allow or block.
I ran these two products on an Ubuntu Linux server that lived in the kids’ closet, and I configured my router so that only certain IP addresses could connect direct to the Internet; all others had to use the Linux server as proxy.
ETA: One of the key reasons for choosing the approaches I have (split network and DNS) is that we no longer have as much control over which devices connect. Think about how many devices your kids and their friends bring home and attach to your network, ranging from the Wii to iPod Touch to other small gadgets. Filtering software on Windows 7 will do little good if the kids are using another device to browse.
Have a long talk with him about it and tell him that you are going to put monitoring software on that will block access to it. If he tries to defeat it, he loses the computer. Period.
Believe me, if an adolescent boy wants to find porn, he’ll find it. I was an adolescent decades before the internet, and I saw my share of porn (and your share and his share and her share, too).
You can delude yourself into thinking you can block his porn, but you won’t. There’s an infinite number of workarounds for just about every filter out there. Considering the technical savviness of the average teen today, a filter will be a slight obstacle at best.
I would advise the “logging and monitoring” approach myself, as mentioned above there are lots of troublesome things a kid can get into online (pirated materials, etc) that aren’t porn. At the same time, you want the kid to be able to feel trusted up to the limits of trust that he’s earned.
I was going to type a lot more, being a networking professional, but instead I can just say “Do what minor7flat5 tells you to”.
Also, you’re not going to keep them away from porn. For a while when I was a teen, we only had BBS access–and I bought floppys filled with porn images from the local rich kid with his 9600baud connection at $5 a pop. What you CAN do is make sure you know what’s going on with regard to your network connection and your hardware–do searches! Monitor your network usage! Keep the computer in a public place!–and honestly, make sure they can talk to you about it when it comes right down to it. As many others have said, the porn you can easily get on the net now is a lot less straightforward than even in the mid-1990s.
Thanks for all the advice, it’s given me a lot to think about. I believe I will investigate minor7flat5’s suggestions, and make some effort to monitor what he’s accessing for a couple of years.
I actually think he should have to work for it a bit. Have an awkward talk to him about fantasy vs. reality, the lives of sex workers, etc. and tell him you’ll be monitoring his usage from time to time (no need to tell him when or how). You don’t want the kid growing up steeped in shame, but there’s something downright wholesome about needing to sneak a wank. As others have said, these aren’t lingerie catalogs anymore. It’s a lot to take in for a young kid of either gender, and while it may not ruin his life Reefer Madness-style, the fruits of the internet porn generation are starting to become adults and have sex with people I know and their expectations aren’t always pretty.
You may say that nothing can beat a real live woman (or man), but you didn’t grow up with any fantasy or scenario you could think of a click of a button away. It sets the bar a little high (or at least a little skewed), and I don’t think it’s ludicrous to suggest that one can get to a point where ‘regular’ sex loses its appeal, and masturbating to porn wins out over real sex. (And FTR, I think this lack of delayed gratification extends beyond porn.)
Be straight with the kid.
"[Kid], Porn isn’t bad. Choking the chicken isn’t bad. Getting viruses on your computer is bad, don’t get viruses by scanning regularly and visiting only relatively trustworthy sites… (if you’re one of those parents, get him a sub to a nice, ‘wholesome’ site, or bookmark a few safe “category” sites, that way he doesn’t have to do the trial-and-error method of finding virus free sites – I can provide links if necessary. :p)
Women aren’t objects. They don’t like being choked by phallus shaped objects or having them rammed with extreme force into their rectums. Doing this could get you arrested for assault, unless you arrange it before hand, but that’s a-whole-nother can of worms, and I’d prefer you and I not have that particular discussion. Here’s your new PC – with Firefox (+Noscript&Adblock), Adaware & Norton preinstalled. Go to town."
If you *do *choose to use a nanny, here is a good free one: K9
Install a keystroke logger. Inform him that you have installed a keystroke logger. Sit back and enjoy the fun as he attempts to obtain porn using only mouse clicks and innocent-sounding search terms!
For about 5 minutes, until he learns about the on-screen keyboard. 
I understand people’s frustrations and how parents and people hate the “just give up” attitude, but alcohol and drugs have very serious consequences. From what I can come up with the only negative things I’ve read among studies is that porn has a tendencies to raise expectations of children. In otherwords the boy can’t figure out why everyone is “so big” or how’d they do that? Or why don’t I like to do that sexual thing?
This is more a learning processes than real harm when compared to drugs or alcohol.
Another argument for “giving up” for lack of a better term, is control. You can to a large extent control alcohol and drugs and cigrarettes and the like, from minors. You can’t do that with Internet porn
You have to know when to pick and fight your battles. Let’s look at prohibition. Alcohol DOES cause a lot of problems. We would be better off without it. But people LIKE it.
If you’re child is going to do it any, such as masturbation, it’s better to say, “OK, that is fine, but that is a private thing.”
I worked with youths at a mentor program and it was so bloody hard to get through to their head to always use a condom. I would tell them and they would be like “She’s on the pill.” I’d say “Oh you think she is, is that what SHE told you. Suppose she’s lying to you, or she doesn’t take it right.” The answer was always “Then it’s her problem.” I would tell them, “Oh no it isn’t. It doesn’t matter how that baby came about or who lied to who or what, you’re gonna spend the next 18 years of your life, paying for it, taking care of it and sitting at home babysitting it.” And the answer was “But that’s not fair.” I would point out that the law doesn’t recognize “fairness” it recongnizes “responsibility.”
And frankly some boys refused to get this.
As a parent you want to say “I’m boss,” but as your child ages, you have to give up some control slowly. Hopefully as you give it up you’re guiding him/her in the best way. And its’ frightening to think of your little baby as being sexual.
Reminds me of a classic line from a “Burns and Allen” radio show. Gracie thinks Mickey Rooney (Guest Star) is a child.
Gracie) But he’s a boy
George) No, Gracie he’s old enough to drive, look in this magazine.
Gracie) That’s awful, look at him sitting in a car, what kind of play thing is that for a child. He ought to be cuddlig a doll
Geroge) Look closer he probably is
My kids don’t really use the internet yet (they’re 3 and 5), but we’ve thought about this. In our house we’re going to have all the computers (and TVs) in public areas. We don’t have a TV in our room and neither will the kids; same with the computers. The main reason is that it gives us as parents the ability to know what are kids are watching/surfing so we can discuss it with them if it is something that seems inappropriate. It also makes it harder for anyone to withdraw from the family to lock themselves in a show or computer game (or whatever).
My son is 15. If he isn’t directing/producing/acting in porn, I’m happy.
The problem with internet filtering software is that it could potentially lead to a false sense of security.
When I was 15, my parents installed one on my computer. The next day I had figured out how to circumvent it. (All I had to do was boot into safe mode and rename or delete a .dll file. When I rebooted, the software would launch, but not monitor the activity. Then I could restore the .dll file and let it resume its monitoring normally.) Later on, I found where the password was stored and cracked it, allowing easier access.
The problem with the software was it gave too many false positives. One example was, I was giving a report on computer crime for school. In addition to porn, the software also blocked things on hacking, so anytime I accessed a legitimately informative site, it popped up “Warning! You’re being a very naughty boy and we’re going to tell your parents!.” It also blocked access to any mention of the word “sex,” which meant if I even happened across a site that used “sex” to mean “gender” instead of “fornication,” I would be virtually reprimanded. Granted, this was 10+ years ago, and I’m sure the technology has advanced somewhat, but the point still stands: you can’t block access to pornography and such without blocking access to legitimate sites.
If you don’t want your kids looking at dirty things online, that’s fine. Talk to them, monitor their usage, do whatever. Just don’t expect a software package to keep your kids out of trouble, and keep them on the straight and narrow all by itself.
That’s a good idea. Except…
Thing is, if he really wants to defeat it, he could probably do it in a way that doesn’t raise suspicion.
This is precisely why I set up a gateway server in my house, through which all Internet traffic passed and was logged.
The nanny software and the Squid proxy did quite a bit to block things, but the more interesting information was found by sifting through the logs, which the kids had been made aware of from the beginning.
It wasn’t a perfect system (indeed, I no longer have a proxy server), but it was far more robust than installing nanny software on individual PCs. All a kid would need to do is run a Linux live CD distro to get around anything you could put on the machine.
I never imagined that I would be able to totally block access—the steam needs to escape somewhere and I would rather it happened at a controlled rate.